Back Wrong
by fleetwood-mouse
Summary: "Except that he'd never died, had he? It was an illusion, smoke and mirrors, all pendulum and no pit. It was all a show; it was this." Or, Sherlock comes back wrong.


DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation with Moffat, Gattis, or Arthur Conan Doyle, to whom all the credit for this universe belongs. Aside from the fun I had writing it, I have not and will not profit from this story in any way.

Work Text:================

Blast, burst, flinch. Duck and tumble. A hand on his shoulder, a wrist braces his hip: John a steady blur; tucking, rolling, up on one knee. Returning fire, shielding, commanding.

Later come the reports. Not the echoing kind that blast and rattle in his ears but the mundane ones, made up of paper, pens, stale polystyrene cups of coffee.

The suspect took a glancing hit, it seems, though not a bad one (it shouldn't matter either way—and it doesn't, not to John because the man is a criminal and not to Sherlock because he's insignificant, middling, nothing), but still, Lestrade's called them in, and now minute after minute is bleeding blue out of Sherlock's fingers through a biro.

To his left, John sniggers. "Rick O'Shea," he says under his breath, and Sherlock feels his own mouth widen. Not at the words themselves, but in reaction to John's quiet amusement.

That stretch, though, that's all he feels.

Lestrade claps him on his shoulder as they exit, pulling him back a step, and John takes the battered and empty cup from his hands and goes on ahead.

"Lucky again, mate," he says, and Sherlock looks at him the way people look at other people. "Lucky John's always got your back."

It must be significant, this, because Lestrade's trying too hard to say something with his eyes, so hard that he can't see that Sherlock is seeing everything, that he always does.

Back. John has his back. And Sherlock is back, now, too, but that's not what any of this means, it's irrelevant, and the words are always so _imprecise_.

He nods and Lestrade lets him go. "Good man," he says, and the gum he's chewing pops and cracks as the door closes behind Sherlock.

_Come back wrong_

1. A silly, meaningless phrase, borrowed from the cheap horror films run and re-run on Saturday nights. A child toddles in front of an 18-wheeler. An Indian burial ground. A fistful of sage, sprinkled salt.

2. Hardly anyone would have argued that Sherlock was right to begin with.

3. He'd never actually died.

He'd never actually died. Like The Woman—improbable, erratic and volatile, life remained. His heart had clocked every one of those interim seconds, was still tick-tick-tocking away. He'd never actually died.

But is that really a pre-requisite? From what he's seen on telly, it would certainly seem so

(though what does the telly know, what, for that matter, does anyone—what could anyone possibly understand about this?)

but inane as it is, Sherlock knows that there are times when he has no choice but to defer to its expertise, its single-minded laugh track of human ignorance and superstition and obfuscation, and other subjects not worth more than a few of his bytes.

And so he decides, again and again, to delete the idea, to perish the thought.

That's not what he keeps forgetting, though.

John watches the Olympics and Sherlock, over his shoulder, keeps vigil.

Costumed women atop a silly little car. Not so young anymore, not an ounce of sense between the five of them, but he recognises the spectacle for what it is. He's lived it, he's living it.

Except that he'd never died, had he? It was an illusion, smoke and mirrors, all pendulum and no pit. It was all a show; it was _this_.

He had not died, not for a moment, and his coming back, his comeback should have been nothing more than that. For John, in contrast, the R might have been an uppercase one—a Return, a Resurrection, a Righting of Wrongs—and that was all very well, very natural.

Sherlock, however, had known, had plotted, planned and schemed. For him, coming back was nothing more than just that. Seeing as he'd never actually died. Had he.

Music begins to play and John smiles with nostalgia. Sherlock lifts his teacup to his lips and breathes in a mouthful of fragrant, empty steam.

What it is, he thinks, is that sometimes it seems like he must have.

_(Like had starved himself amid pure a sea of bobbing pomegranates, as if he'd Brahms'd that polycephalic dog into a stupor and grabbed that spider's thread to wrack and heave and tug his way out of there, eyes wracked and straining over the pools of blood and hopeless grasping sinners down below.)_

Then, Sherlock reasons, this would make sense.

If such inhuman efforts were to rob him of the energy for anything else, that would be perfectly logical, perfectly sound. That's the most obvious theory—it lends itself easily to explanation: exhaustion. Like any other fatigue, he tells himself, it will pass.

It doesn't.

The year marches on around him, and there's no quickening, no kindling, no burgeoning flicker of life or of guilt. He examines his white hands under the tap, but the blasted spot is out and gone. Karma holds no water; that's clear enough now with the web swept cleanly away.

He drinks the tea John makes him and he eats, if sparsely. He takes cases and passes them up, and he solves the ones he takes without event.

Some nights, he steals away from the flat and crashes through the midnight streets like somebody else's dream, his own breath like a freight train in the rounded silence, devouring the details of the sleeping city.

There are times when he catches John watching him expectantly, and it's then that Sherlock studies ignorance like an atom, splitting its hairs and waiting for the inevitable explosion. It's a relief each time John gives up and looks away.

He can't continue on like this, like a root, like a lighthouse—John's every movement hinging upon some implicit, anticipated signal and Sherlock does not feel a storm coming. John's waiting, though, is so tangible, so viscerally magnetic that it seems apt to will the answer into being. It would probably be more merciful if it did.

Predictably, it doesn't.

In January, Mrs Hudson falls in the shower, has a bad scare. Sherlock's mouth is firm when he calls the ambulance, his eyes clear and hard.

He helps her wrap up in a towel, and he holds her hand until the EMTs arrive. His pulse never reaches seventy.

John fusses over her til she's walking better, buys a new shower mat, a funny little buzzer. Sherlock finds himself filling silences with his microscope rather than his violin. It seems less deceptive that way. John notices (or so Sherlock thinks), but offers no comment.

He does have a history of this (he muses as John's gaze veers to break against the rocks once again), of autogenesis, self-fulfilment. Which means there's no reason not to believe.

The caring, for instance, had been like that. _Not much cop,_ he'd decided, _counterproductive, a defect,_ and given it up for a bad job until finally it was gone.

That had been what he wanted, that had been best for the work, but it seems, now, dangerously indistinguishable from something else, an idea whose edges he skirts with firm blindness. Sherlock can't entertain the notion that he's unwittingly submitted to someone else's will, that maybe Jim has won after all. Hearts are a funny thing; not his area.

But it ought to work the other way as well, the caring. That's simple mathematics. He knows this and yet he feels none of the impetus to try. There's no wiggling, niggling seed, no sprout of determined green. Static.

_This is what you wanted._

That much is true, he thinks. The teabag bobs against the edges of his cup, sinks under the heat.

When he next looks up, his legs are stiff from sitting; his hips crackle against the padding of his armchair. On the other side of the window, the sky is a strange, foggy colour. Dusk, or dawn—he seems to be losing track.

His tea has long gone cold. Sounds of John from the other room: stretching, coughing, moving. Sherlock adds sugar and stirs.


End file.
